Do the Math: A Novel of the Inevitable

By Philip B Persinger

What could be worse than losing the love of your life? Getting her back!

William Teale is a brilliant professor of mathematics. His theory of inevitability posits that any human action, no matter how insignificant, might result in a disproportionately huge calamity.

His wife, Virginia "Faye" Warner, is a world-famous romance novelist who specializes in reuniting soul mates after a tragic and prolonged separation. According to her math, "one past and two hearts plus one love equals four-ever." The Teale-Warner marriage is a thing of geometric and artistic perfection, a melding of the heart and the brain-amour and algebra.

But when Faye's ghostwriter suffers a nervous breakdown and shakes all the arrows out of Cupid's quiver, Faye reintroduces her husband to love. Unfortunately, it's not with herself, but with the woman William had loved and lost years ago. Love is about to clash with inevitability, and it's unclear which will emerge victorious.

Told in the off-beat voice of William's graduate intern, Roger, Do the Math reveals the curious relationship between logic and love and the delightful consequences of taking a chance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462014224

Philip B Persinger

On two occasions, at two different locations in crowded midtown Manhattan, Philip B. Persinger ran into a woman whom he had not seen in twenty-five years but thought of still. They are now married and live with their two children in New Jersey, a short walk from the Hudson River.

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Contents

Prologue

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Epilogue

Prologue

I am standing on a headland overlooking the Hudson River, an hour north of New York City. It is not a palisade. Those dramatic cliffs are to the south. Up here, the sides of the river are more like foothills until High Tor, which introduces you to the ever-rising mountains to come. About twenty minutes north is the most perilous precipice in the world. I once watched a man knowingly step off it. I don’t think he had a choice. Fate yanked his chain with a second stab at heaven on earth. All he had to do was play the assassin.

That was in 1978, when I was an eager young graduate student ready to conquer the numbers. Today, I am a tenured professor in mathematics at a fine college in Philadelphia. This is the first time I have viewed the river from this part of the hill in the intervening twenty-five years. I remember that it was much colder on that night when I last stood here.

We are driving north along the Hudson River because my friend Harvey is the best high school math teacher in Canada. It’s official. He is getting an award.

I have known Harvey forever. He is among my oldest friends. He must like me too, because he has tolerated me just as long. He is so smart that I am usually nervous talking to him, knowing that he probably regards whatever subject I land upon as lightweight. But I did get one tangible sign of acceptance—and maybe the notion that he didn’t think I was a total moron—on his last night in graduate school. I had taken him out to dinner.

You know what you are? I observed, sipping one more drink than I needed.

What is that? he asked casually, like he always did when he had you under his microscope.

I was used to that. You are an enigma couched in a riddle wrapped in a fine Cuban cigar.

You’re OK too, he responded with a regal nod.

On our way to Canada, the Thruway would have been faster, but I made the detour. I wanted to stand on those heights and remember who I had been and what had happened so many years ago. My wife doesn’t mind. She knows the story.

Years before, I had exploited it shamelessly. What else was I supposed to do? She was a great beauty—still is—but I was only a mere young adjunct, lecturing hourly to a mob of napping freshmen. I was desperate to show her that mathematicians have huge hearts and can act heroically on even larger passions. Suzanne claims that she saw right through my contrivance, but I know that the story captured her as it touches everyone else who hears it.

I skipped the town and turned directly onto Mountain Road. I am not surprised that I remembered every twist and turn of the long climb up the steep hill. Although there are many new homes and some missing landmarks, the large iron gates are right where I expected them to be. I drove past them and parked on the gravel. The bronze plaque on the stone gate read Mid-Hudson Wellness Center.

When we stepped out of the car, Suzanne said, You take in the view. I’m going down to the big house to peek in the windows.

Don’t get arrested, I replied.

She grinned broadly.

Say hi to the desk sergeant when you bail me out, she laughed.

She kissed me then skipped down the hill.

From where I stand, I can see her finally able to spy on the mansion that she drooled over in Architectural Digest. I think her only jealousy of me is that I had spent so much time inside that house back then.

The sun is getting closer to its good-night kiss upon the distant hilltops. The river has already started to doze. It is hushed and losing color. Only the red and green channel buoys, which still catch the late rays, are standing out.

I turn around to face the town that held such a huge place in my heart. It was the first town I had lived in where I hadn’t been born—where I woke up in the morning and dealt with adults who weren’t my parents, a place that knew me for what I thought and did and not for where I had come from.

But this tale is not about me. It is the account of a man who was developing a mathematical theory about the inevitable. He was my mentor, fifty years old, a grown-up in my eyes. I am that age now. At the time, I did not realize how young he was. But I did learn that there is no retirement age for love and want.

There are few things worse, or more tantalizing, than being one step away from realizing a dream. I was there at the end, observing him, as he balanced on the brink, aware that the only safe move would be to fall backward. Yet he took the step forward, placing his foot firmly onto the air in front of him.

1

I will start about three months before the story begins, during my senior year at Garrison College. It was a dreary Pennsylvania Tuesday in February. I was sitting in my advisor’s office watching heavy gray clouds dump sleet and freezing rain onto an even grayer landscape.

Dr. Hazlett was an example of everything wrong with the tenure system. His lectures were flat and probably unchanged since he first presented them at the beginning of his career. He was a capable mathematician, but he communicated no joy in it. The only way he kept current with academic journals was to throw them out periodically, which he was doing at that moment.

Sitting in front of a large garbage can that he had borrowed from the custodian, he fanned the pages of each abstract or learned publication for a brief moment before relegating it to the deep. When I got bored watching the freezing rain outside, I started to read titles on the bookshelves around me. It was clear that his specialty was probability, specifically game theory and how to win at blackjack, roulette and craps.

He disappeared behind his desk for a moment to pour something else into his coffee mug. Then he looked up and commented, We both know why we are here.

It’s mandatory, I replied.

Exactly, he agreed as he opened the file folder that housed my permanent record. So what do you want to do?

I want to go to graduate school, I answered.

He closed the file.

That was easy, he said and took a pull from his coffee.

Not that easy, I said.

He seemed slightly irritated that one of his students would require additional attention.

Why not? he asked.

The graduate schools that will give me money aren’t that good, I pointed out. The good ones won’t give me money.

That’s unfortunate, he said. But not unusual.

He reopened my file and actually looked inside it this time.

What went so wrong in Probability & Statistics? he inquired.

I was bad at it.

Why?

It’s boring, I explained.

But, oh, so lucrative, he murmured as he read on. Check the odds.

I wasn’t only bad at prob/stat, I hated it—thereby becoming the only math major at Garrison whom everyone wanted to play cards with. I have the worst poker face in the universe.

You were the only student who showed up on time for my early class in logic, Dr. Hazlett noted.

I was your only student still living with his parents, I replied.

You did well in it.

I like logic.

So do I, he confessed. That’s how I got where I am today.

Those words did not encourage me. I did not aspire to be the next Dr. Hazlett.

Logic is wonderful, he mused. Leave the flash and sparkle of fractal geometry to the youngsters. They all burn out by twenty-two anyway.

His droopy eye was running, and he mopped it with a handkerchief. But when he finished reading and closed the folder and finally looked up at me, he was focused.

I’ll tell you a secret, he offered in a conspirator’s voice, as he took another shot of coffee. Every job ultimately turns to crap. It’s just a matter of time.

He pushed my file to the side and pulled another stack of academic journals to the center of the desk. He spent the next few minutes weeding through them.

Let’s look at it logically. he finally said. A simple syllogism. All jobs turn to crap. All men must eat. Men who don’t have crappy jobs don’t eat.

He looked at me over his glasses, I got that one from my roommate at MIT. He was a brilliant son of a gun, but a sucker for the contrapositive.

The mere sound of those three hallowed initials made me feel jealous and more hopeless.

Be a math teacher, he directed as he riffled faster and faster through the shrinking stack of publications. I will let you deduce the reason.

Job security? I guessed.

Exactly. There are never enough math teachers. He dumped the remaining contents of the mug down his throat. Do you know why teachers all wear the mark of the beast: 666?

No.

It stands for six hours a day, six months a year and six years before your next sabbatical, he chortled with self-congratulation.

But how can you stand it? I asked.

Stand what?

Delivering the same lectures, day after day, year in and year out, I blurted. Doesn’t the monotonous drone of your own voice make you want to blow your brains out?

Dr. Hazlett’s face twitched slightly.

I see that you didn’t do so well in Tact & Civility 101, he noted dryly.

He was right. There was no required course in diplomacy at Garrison College, but if there had been one, I would have flunked. I didn’t mean to be rude or insensitive. I simply had a young man’s impulsiveness, probably exacerbated by my dad’s mantra that there is no such thing as a stupid question. Unfortunately, he forgot to warn me that there were millions of inappropriate ones. Even now, I sometimes feel that I’m missing a tiny circuit in my brain, the synapse between wonder and ask out loud.

Dr. Hazlett picked up the next journal and opened it in the middle.

Son of a bitch! he exclaimed.

He broke the spine and folded the magazine inside out, placing it flat on the table.

That’s him. My roommate at Tech—William Teale—the smartest guy I’ve ever met. Should have gotten the Comstock Prize. I’ll be damned.

He didn’t bother with the formality of coffee. Pulling the bottle out of the bottom drawer of his desk, he poured whisky straight into the mug.

That’s your future, he said, jabbing his thumb at the photograph. Him. Write him a letter. Tell him I sent you. Be an intern. It’s Hudson Polytechnic, a good school, and they’ve got piles of money left over from World War II. He’s brilliant.

Dr. Hazlett shook his head in amazement.

2

For non-mathematicians or those who have not studied philosophy on an academic level, the Comstock Prize is the preeminent award given for achievement in logic. It is not the Nobel Prize, but it is as good as you’re going to get in the field. There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics, which most entry-level math students like to believe is because Alfred Nobel’s fiancée ran off with a mathematician.

To be invited to present to the Comstock Review Board is in itself an honor.

I wrote Dr. Teale, requesting an interview to discuss my qualifications for being his intern. He returned my letter straight off with Don’t need one scrawled across the bottom of the page.

When I showed it to Hazlett, he handed me a yellowed monograph.

Read this, he said. That’s his first published article.

Hazlett then wrote Dr. Teale personally. He received a more civilized response than I had. It was written on elegant stationery.

No, thank you. Don’t use them anymore. Wm.

Besides being disappointed, I found his response rude and arrogant. I was in the mood to find even more flaws in his character as well as in his reasoning, so over the weekend I read the monograph.

The paper was entitled Significant Inconsequentiality. It was short, just over five pages and it blew my mind. What he had constructed was like one of those complicated Japanese wooden puzzles that all fit together perfectly, except when they don’t.

I was familiar with every single tool he’d used. Even at my young age, I thought he was a little obsessed with the contrapositive, but his use of the Henkel matrix was clever. Furthermore, he applied Leffert to great effect. I had never seen Eckstein’s Parallel show up so unexpectedly.

I could ace a test on any one of these elements. I could parse them. I could define them. I could use them in context. But I had never seen them all so effortlessly deployed in concert.

But there was more. I got a sense as I reread the article for the third time that he was creating a new field. It wasn’t just logic. Sure, the thing was steeped in conventional inference, but there were other bits—like algebra and maybe even a quantum thing that I didn’t understand. He even had the stones to use a quadratic equation in the middle of a truth table. It was like reading an early paper by Isaac Newton, just before he realized that he would have to invent calculus to solve his problems—mathematics on LSD.

I wanted to work with this man more than anything in the world. When I read in his bio that he was my age when he wrote the paper, I thought my head would explode.

The basic premise of the paper was simple: that a negligible event could have huge consequences. Kind of like, for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. That gave me an idea.

Dear Dr. Teale, I wrote. What if meeting with me for ten minutes ultimately resulted in your life being changed forever? There could hardly be anything more insignificant in your life than ten minutes with me.

I was flabbergasted when I got my letter back. He had written across the top, Philadelphia Airport. Gate E9. 3:45 PM. March 19. 10 MIN ONLY!

3

William, I would learn much later, was changing planes on his way back from the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Logic and Inference at Carnegie Mellon.

I was nervous, but not because it was a job interview. I was nervous because over the course of my educational career I had known a dozen math teachers, but I had never met a mathematician. Would he see right through me?

I positioned myself at the bottom of the escalators and intently studied the face of each person who glided by. A colorful mosaic. There were smiles and frowns and inscrutable looks. Strangers passing by, our eyes would catch and our worlds joined, but only for a moment. Then the inquiring look would dissolve into a glance, which would become a blink that would pop like a drifting soap bubble.

As I watched for him, the stream of people was hypnotic, and my thoughts drifted to Teale’s paper. What was the force of contact? What would happen if two of these terrestrial bodies collided? Would it just be a longer shared look, still ultimately reduced to a blink and blankness, or would our lives become inexorably linked and new futures born?

What of those whom we missed due to a wasted hour, a late taxicab or a detour of twenty feet? These were the faces that would not or could not be tested in passing. These were the fundamental questions posed in the paper William had written decades before.

I grew weary of the continuous stream of passing faces and my eyes began to wander around the terminal. It was then that I noticed a disruption on the moving stairs. A moment of chaos. People pushed and shoved. Elbows swung. I heard a woman scream and more than one man cursed out loud. The tumult seemed to be moving up the down escalator.

It was over as quickly as it began, after the last straggler mumbled the last complaint. A new group of faces was ignorant of the previous eddy in the stream.

I felt his presence even before I saw him, standing in front of me so close that I could read Wm Teale on the conference nametag still hanging from his lapel.

He was over six feet tall when he stood up straight, which he wasn’t doing at the moment. Although he had the distant look of a deep thinker, he was muscular and he shifted often with a certain restlessness. There was a constant vibration of strength and athleticism that belied his academic credentials.

He looked about with intelligent eyes. They weren’t exactly green or even hazel; they were flecked with green and umbers. His hair was mostly brown, but there was a seasoning of gray around his ears. It was slightly long, like the academic longhair that he was—yet he was a good-looking guy for a college professor. Compared to Dr. Hazlett, he was Cary Grant.

Dr. Teale? I asked.

He looked straight through me. He hadn’t heard me.

I repeated myself, less tentatively. Dr. Teale.

If this is a chance meeting, he said flatly, I would prefer that you keep it to yourself and simply go away. I don’t want to use up my lifetime quota on you.

Professor, I’m Roger Davison, I said. We have an appointment.

He finally focused on me, then set off at a smart pace. Right. I remember. Another misguided youth sent to me for correction. Walk with me.

None of the books on job interviews that I had crammed prepared me to show off my strengths while trying not to lose a fast walker in a crowded airport. It was all I could do to keep my breath.

How’s Hazlett? he asked over his shoulder.

Fine, sir. I panted. He sends you his best.

‘From each according to his ability’, he quipped dryly, then stopped, looked around distractedly and started off in a different direction.

As my mind raced along with my feet, I decided to go with my mom’s first principle: that people love to talk about themselves.

I read one of your papers, I said.

So I deduced from your letter.

He stopped and turned. I felt the weight of his full attention. What rock did you find that under?

Dr. Hazlett gave it to me.

Did you give it back?

No, sir.

Good. Burn it, he said as he started walking again. What do you want to do?

Mathematics, I answered.

Looking at me sharply, he warned, Better think again. Abstractions are nothing to base your life on.

We were so close that I could see his eyes wander to the left as he added absentmindedly, Wait for a number you can dance to.

Don’t move, he commanded, as his eyes locked onto their target. I’ll be right back.

I stepped up onto a bench, but he quickly disappeared into the crowd. It was a spectacular display of broken field running from an academic who had never seen a football scholarship.

I sat down on the bench to wait. Time passed and I felt more dejected with every minute. Standing on the bench again, I made one last scan of the terminal before I snuffed out the last flicker of hope. This wasn’t my first blind date. I knew when I was the loser, so I left. I had waited so long that I was charged for another hour in the parking lot.

That year, March came in like a lion but went out like a quart of curdled milk. I was so mopey and blue that my mom told me to get outside and run around the house, like when I was eleven. I was dreading the day after graduation. I had no plan. No future.

Things changed in the first week of April, when I got a letter.

Despite your virtuosity at insignificance, it started out, my life has not been radically altered.

What a creep, I thought. What a smug creep.

Nevertheless, the letter continued, an inconsequential moment with you resulted in a glimpse of an alternate universe. A deal’s a deal. I will see you in the fall.

Alternate universe? My relief was edged with anxiety. The letter ended with a future sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

The first semester will be probationary, of course.

Of course, I replied acridly to his scribbled words. It was like every free offer I had ever sent away for. It was free until it wasn’t, and then you were screwed.

4

Hudson Polytechnic Institute was located in New Coventry, New York. The train was the best way to get there. North of Spuyten Duyvil, the tracks ran practically on the river’s edge. My eyes were glued to the riverscape outside the window. As I watched the Palisades pass by, the other shore turned into the grand headland of the Tappan Zee. There was a regatta across the river. The water was dotted with small white sails tacking and darting across one another’s paths.

I climbed the steps from Track Five and pushed open the ancient door, which groaned and scraped. A flock of pigeons started and flew in a broad swooping circle above the great room. The station at New Coventry was a testament to the salad days of the New York Central, a cathedral in iron and riveted gothic revival, when every thinking man knew that transportation by rail was the state of the art and would rule for the next five hundred years. In the large and open nave, oak benches lined up like pews. High above, skylights and clerestory windows created the golden diagonals of light, which the birds now crisscrossed.

As I looked about for the taxi stand, a couple standing beside the information window caught my eye. He was tall and intent. From what I could see, she was lithe, blonde and spectacular. They were unaware of anything but each other. He was talking. She was rapt, touching him on the arm and chest. They stood silent for a moment, then he kissed her on the cheek. She tenderly took his face in her hands and returned the gesture on the mouth.

There was something very familiar about the man. I peered at him as I passed by, wondering what it was. I was looking over my shoulder instead of in front of me and did not see the wire magazine rack that I crashed into, sending it, me and dozens of colorful publications cascading to the floor.

The next thing I knew, William was looking down at me. He seemed as startled to see me on the floor as I was to see him above me.

Are you all right? he asked.

That was you, I replied dazedly when I saw he was alone. But there were two of you.

Are you seeing double?

No. A woman.

He assisted me to my feet and we both cleaned up my mess. I bought a copy of Scientific American in atonement.

Don’t worry, he reassured me. She was only a phantom.

She was a very pretty phantom, I said stupidly, before I had enough sense to stop talking.

He fastidiously straightened out the magazine rack so that it stood square to the newsstand.

This must have been a unique event in science, he mused. A shared hallucination.

He was different somehow than when I’d seen him at the airport. I tried to put my finger on it. For one thing, he was standing at his full height. His eyes were dancing and his brown hair was unruly as if it had been mussed by a sultry torch singer at a supper club. He looked very confident. I guessed I would be too if I had such a beautiful woman so recently in my arms.

Did you bring the paper? he asked me.

Which one? I stammered blankly.

Mine, he said with a look that implied that I was simpleminded.

Yes. It’s in my bag.

In that case, I’ll give you a ride.

I followed him out of the train station to a white Chevy van with tinted windows.

Toss your things in here, he said as he unlocked the double doors in back. When they swung open, I could only gape.

Rather than the customary cargo space or bench seats, I saw the world’s smallest, plushest sitting room. An ottoman sat at the foot of an overstuffed reading chair in floral chintz. There was a brass floor lamp at its side. An exquisite oriental rug covered the floor.

A pastel of ballet students at the barre in the style of Degas graced one of the dark paneled walls, while a reproduction in oil of Botticelli’s Venus faced it on the other side. A miniature television set hung on a bracket from the ceiling across from the chair, and next to that—and I had to look twice in disbelief—was a gimbaled aquarium with an assortment of tropical fish.

All the comforts of home, I remarked as I climbed into the passenger’s seat. And then some.

It’s my wife’s, he replied cryptically.

We drove out of the station, across the railroad tracks and through the town. New Coventry had survived the fate of many of its neighbors following the collapse of both river and rail traffic, but barely. Its two main sources of economic activity were the university and the nuclear power plant just north of town.

We turned onto Mountain Road. This is the back way, William explained as he switched on the radio.

Like an irritating teenager, he couldn’t settle on one radio station or another and he flitted back and forth across the dial until a woman’s voice caught his ear.

I never view it as a job, she said in a soft but practiced voice. It is more a way of life than anything else.

William stopped fussing with the radio and returned his attention to driving up the hill.

"You are listening to Page Turner, a woman’s voice said, a weekly review of popular fiction. Our guest today is Virginia Faye Warner, winner of the Meekham Award for Romance Literature. Virginia, I want you to fess up."

Now you’re scaring me, the writer responded with a nervous titter.

Seriously, Virginia, to be as prolific as you have been and still maintain the quality that you have exhibited consistently over the years, must demand an incredible amount of work and discipline. How do you do it?

"Well, Margaret, I can only answer by saying that there is so much joy and happiness in what I do. It is an act of creation. I never regard it as work.